Assessment of the attitude toward medication and reasons for drug compliance among schizophrenic patients attending the tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Abstract Introduction: Medication compliance is one of the most difficult challenges in the management of schizophrenia in India. Compliance broadly means the extent to which a person’s behavior, in terms of taking medications, following diets and executing lifestyle changes, visiting for follow-up, etc., coincides with medical and health advice. The current study has tried to assess the attitudes and reasons for compliance as well as noncompliance among patients with schizophrenia, which can provide the basis for planning effective interventional strategies for the mental health professionals for improving compliance of the patient in the future. Methodology: A hospital-based noninterventional cross-sectional study was done on 135 schizophrenic patients attending the outpatient services in the Department of Psychiatry, Government General Hospital, Kurnool, hospital by convenient sampling method for 6 months from October 2021 to March 2022, after obtaining approval from the institutional ethical committee. Data were collected and entered in Microsoft Excel and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 16 version software. Results: The prevalence observed in the present study, 75 (55.56%) participants were compliant, i.e., had a positive attitude toward medication and 60 (44.44%) participants were noncompliant toward medication. Higher mean scores for the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale score were seen in the compliant group (101.25 ± 19.27) than the noncompliant group (100.98 ± 22.51). Conclusion: Main reasons for drug noncompliance identified in the present study were financial difficulty, distance from the hospital, improvement or no improvement in symptoms, side effects, lack of insight into the mental illness, and lack of awareness about the need for long-term medication.